Stalin;origins

!!!" !#$%&'$
Stalin’s SSSR

session i
origins

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

major themes of this session

I. Georgia

II. boyhood and education;1878-1899

III. konspiratsia; 1900-1904

IV.1905; the “dress rehearsal”

V. Stalin goes abroad; 1906-1907

VI. gangsters and groupies; 1907-1913

VII. Siberian “hard time”; 1913-1917


Gori
Stalin’s
birthplace

Georgia:Zakavkaz TransCaucasia


Peaks of the 1,000 mile Caucasus Mountains are higher than the Alps


Lake Ritsa where Stalin spent part of his last vacation in 1952


As of 1897, 1,051,032 lived in the governorate, with around 20% of
them being urban. Ethnic Georgians constituted 44.3% of the
population, followed by Armenians (18.7%), Azeris (10.2%),
Russians (including Ukrainians and Old Believers, 9.7%),
Ossetians (6.4%), Avars (3.2%), Greeks (2.6%), Turks (2.4%), etc.
More than half of the population adhered to Eastern Orthodox
Christianity with signiﬁcant Muslim, Catholic and Jewish minorities.
[1]


Circassian warrior, early 19th c.; Lak girl, 1883; Georgian Prince Kakutsa
Cholokashvili, 1924 (leader of anti-Bolshevik uprising)


contemporary Georgians in their traditional costumes called chokhas


The origin of the name Georgia is still disputed and has been
explained in the following ways:
1. Linking it semantically to Greek and Latin roots (Greek:
γεωργία, transliterated geōrgía, "agriculture", γεωργός,
geōrgós, "tiller of the land", and γεωργικός, geōrgikós,
Latin: georgicus, "agricultural").
2. The country took its name from that of Saint George, itself
a derivative of the aforementioned Greek root. Or, at the
very least, the popularity of the cult of Saint George in
Georgia inﬂuenced the spread of the term.


The origin of the name Georgia is still disputed and has been
explained in the following ways:
1. Linking it semantically to Greek and Latin roots (Greek:
γεωργία, transliterated geōrgía, "agriculture", γεωργός,
geōrgós, "tiller of the land", and γεωργικός, geōrgikós,
Latin: georgicus, "agricultural").
2. The country took its name from that of Saint George, itself
a derivative of the aforementioned Greek root. Or, at the
very least, the popularity of the cult of Saint George in
Georgia inﬂuenced the spread of the term.
3. Under various Persian empires (536 BC-AD 638),
Georgians were called Gurjhān (Gurzhan/Gurjan), or "Gurj/
Gurzh people." The early Islamic/Arabic sources spelled
the name Kurz/Gurz and the country Gurjistan. The
contemporary Russian name for the country, "Gruziya," is
similar. This also could evolve or at least contribute to the
later name of Georgia.


A Georgian couple photographed in 1912 by Prokudin-Gorskii


An Ossetian couple by the same photographer


The Georgians were primarily a rural people, composed of a largely
impoverished ancient feudal aristocracy (5.26 % of the entire
Georgian population [823,968-JBP] in 1897) and a peasantry. The
Georgian urban class was small and insigniﬁcant. It was the
déclassé nobility which, from the beginning, assumed the
leadership over the cultural and political life of Georgia. The
Georgians possessed nearly all the elements that usually go into
the formation of national consciousness: a distinct language, with
its own alphabet; an ancient and splendid literary heritage; a
national territory; and a tradition of statehood and military prowess.
In the 1870s a cultural movement arose among the Georgian
aristocracy, which, with its interest in the newly liberated peasant,
assumed forms akin to Russian populism [the Narodnik movement-
JBP].

Richard Pipes, The Formation of the Soviet Union; Communism
and Nationalism 1917-1923, rev. ed. 1974, p. 17


Saint George slaying
the dragon


Gori today and the medieval fortress on the hill
which dominates it


boyhood and education


Stalin’s birthplace and the temple built around it


Dubious Father--”Crazy Beso” Djugashvili (1850-1910)

• 17 May 1872-handsome young bootmaker, Vissarion
“Beso” Djugashvili, age 22, married beautiful
Ekaterina “Keke” Geladze, age 17

• he spoke four languages: Georgian, Russian,
Armenian, and Turkish

• sadly, other men in Gori found Keke attractive as well.
Stalin never denied rumors that one of them might
have been his father

• jealousy was part of the reason his presumed father
became an alcoholic wife- and child-beater. He also
had failed as a shoemaker employing apprentices

• 1884-Beso left for Tiﬂis, declining to support his wife
and six-year-old son
The “ofﬁcial” Soviet portrait


“Keke”--”...pretty and intelligent, but forceful,
sarcastic and outspoken---like her son”

• before liberation, her father had been a serf
to the local grandee, Prince Amilakhvari

• 1875-her ﬁrst son died, age 2 months

• 1877-the second son died of measles, age 6
months

• 6 December 1878-a third son, Joseph, was
born. He survived, “weak, fragile, thin”

• the second and third toes of his left foot were
webbed, but he lived; “Keke’s miracle,”
Soso, (nickname, like our “Joey”)
Stalin’s mother in old age


Iosef Vissarionovich Dj(or zh)ugashvili
YO•sef VEE•sar•YO•na•veech JEW•gosh•VEE•lee

this would be the Russian pronunciation
can’t help you with the Georgian!


Stalin’s names, nicknames, bylines and aliases
• Josef Vissarionovich Djugashvili • Besoshvili

• Soso • Ivanov

• Soselo (for his teenage poetry) • pockmarked Oska

• Beso • the Caucasian

• Koba • the Milkman

• Petrov • Pockmarked (Chopura)

• Ivanovich • Ioska Koriavyi (Joe Pox)

• Koba Ivanovich • J.V. Stalin


Stalin’s real father? Koba Egnatashvili

• a wrestler and rich innkeeper

• a local hero who loved, funded, and protected
Soso from the drunken attacks of his abusive
presumed father, Beso

• he was a patron of the family, comforter of the wife,
and sponsor of the son

• married with children, lived afﬂuently, owned
several taverns, and was a prosperous wine-dealer


Stalin’s half brother?

• a wrestler, like his father

• childhood friend of Stalin

• later promoted to Kremlin courier, NKVD
General and trusted food taster

• Sasha was nicknamed “the Rabbit”

• in his last years, Stalin gave “the impression
that he was [Koba] Egnatashvili’s illegitimate
son” to a fellow Georgian

Sasha Egnatashvili


Another candidate, Gori police chief Damian Davrichewy

• he so ﬂirted with Keke that Beso tried to kill
him

• his son, Josef, would write in his memoirs
“the birth was gossiped about in the
neighborhood-- that the real father was Koba
Egnatashvili… or my own father Damian
Davrichewy”

• “Everyone in Gori knew about his affair with
Soso’s pretty mother”--Mayor Jourouli

• he helped Keke when she complained about
The policeman’s son, Josef who claimed to
Beso’s abuse be Stalin’s half brother. He and Stalin
became the most notorious (and
successful) bank robbers and terrorists in
the Caucasus.


Weighing up all these stories, it is most likely that Stalin was the
son of Beso despite the drunkard’s rantings about Soso as a
“bastard.” A married woman was always expected to be
respectable, but it is hardly outrageous if the pretty young Keke,
a semi-widow, did become the mistress of Egnatashvili when
her marriage disintegrated….Egnatashvili’s grandson, Guram
Ratishvili, puts it best: “We simply do not know if he was Stalin’s
father, but we do know that the merchant became the boy’s
substitute father.”

Simon Monteﬁore, Young Stalin. 2007, pp. 27-28


the rough streets of Gori

Soso became a streetﬁghter, gang leader and charismatic manipulator in the rough
streets of Gori, one of the most violent towns in the Tsar’s empire: Religious
holidays were celebrated with organized brawls involving the entire population,
from toddlers to greybeards. Stalin’s birthplace [sic] is the house on the left.


another of his childhood homes (left) and the shrine to Great Stalin which was
later erected over it (right)


the earliest photo of Stalin

Already a charismatic leader, the schoolboy Soso Djugashvili, the future Stalin, about ten years old…
suggested the taking of this photograph, ordered the photographer, arranged the sitting and placed
himself in his favorite commanding position: back center


Gori Spiritual School (1888-1893)

• Keke wanted Soso to become a priest, Beso, to become a shoemaker; Keke won

• outside school, he tried to dominate one of the gangs, fought unsuccessfully with older,
tougher boys, wouldn’t give up

• in school, he was a serious inquiring successful student. His favorite subject was music. He
would enjoy singing and had a beautiful voice throughout his life.

• all ﬁrst-hand accounts recorded his pugnacity towards rivals. But he was also devout, hard-
working and determined to succeed, to move out of the poverty he endured at home


Gori Spiritual School (1888-1893)

• Keke wanted Soso to become a priest, Beso, to become a shoemaker; Keke won

• outside school, he tried to dominate one of the gangs, fought unsuccessfully with older,
tougher boys, wouldn’t give up

• in school, he was a serious inquiring successful student. His favorite subject was music. He
would enjoy singing and had a beautiful voice throughout his life.

• all ﬁrst-hand accounts recorded his pugnacity towards rivals. But he was also devout, hard-
working and determined to succeed, to move out of the poverty he endured at home

• at graduation, highest marks in every subject except arithmetic--Old Testament, New
Testament, Orthodox catechism, liturgy, Russian, Church Slavonic, Georgian, geography,
handwriting, and Russian and Georgian church music. A four instead of a ﬁve in ancient
Greek. (He would later read Plato in the original to while away the hours in prison)


the Adelkhanov Shoe Factory, Tiflis (1890)

• age 12, he had come to the hospital in Tiflis after an injury to his legs from a runaway carriage

• then his father compelled him to work with him in the factory

• founded in 1875, considered “among the most decent” toward its 80 workers. It had a medical
facility. But it stank so bad that grown men vomited. It was often half-flooded and always dark

• child laborers like Soso received lower wages for their “fetch and carry” work

• it would be Stalin’s only experience as a “proletarian”

• Keke swung into action to get him back to school in Gori, using her church contacts. Despite this
interruption to his education, he returned and finished with top marks. But he graduated at sixteen,
several years older than his schoolmates

• frustrated, Beso swore never to give another kopeck to his family, cutting them out of his life


Tiﬂis (Tbilisi)


Tbilisi (125,000), unlike Gori (20,000), had a multinational
population wherein the Georgians themselves were a minority
(26%). Along with them were Russians (30%), Armenians (30%),
Tatars, Persians and Germans. Russians lived in the center on the
west bank. Armenian and Persian bazaars lay nearby. Georgians
had their district on the other side of the river. To the north of them
lived the German immigrants who had moved there...at Emperor
Alexander I’s invitation.

Robert Service,Stalin; A Biography, p. 33


Tiﬂis Spiritual Seminary a 19th century photo


“The Stone Sack” (1894-1899)

• Russification meant Georgian speech, “a filthy language,”
was a punishable offense

• seminarists were allowed into the city for just one hour a day

• gestures of respect were demanded for the Rector and his
staff

• miscreants were punished by solitary confinement

• informants among the seminarists were used to stamp out
insubordination

• only approved books were allowed and lockers were
inspected regularly

• early to rise and early to bed, a diet of bread and beans
contemporary photo

the curriculum

• it was taken for granted that Russian and Church Slavonic languages had been mastered

• Christian vocational training was not predominant at ﬁrst

• not only Russian literature and history but also Greek and Latin were studied

• mastery of Xenophon’s Anabasis led, in the fourth year, to Plato’s Apology and Phaedo

• “Although the curriculum in secular subjects was not as expansive as in the gimnazias
[private secondary schools] it gave pupils a fairly broad education by the European standards
of the time.” --Service, p.35


from rebel to Marxist atheist revolutionary


Stalin was initially, “calm, attentive, modest and bashful”
remembers one schoolmate...The moody teenage Soso was taking
stock--and becoming a self-conscious romantic poet--but he was
also studying seriously [with almost all 5s (As) and standing eighth
in his class]
At the end of term, Soso took his poems to...the country’s greatest
poet, Prince Ilya Chavchavadze….The Prince chose ﬁve poems to
publish--quite an achievement. [He] called Stalin the ‘young man
with the burning eyes.’ He was admired in Georgia as a poet
before he was known as a revolutionary.

Monteﬁore, pp. 56-57


the battle of the dormitories; Soso vs Father “Black
Spot”

• rebellion began with reading “forbidden books.” First, the novels of Victor Hugo

• Black Spot patrolled after “lights out” and caught him--punishment cell

• next came the poetry of Nekrasov and Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done? Zola’s
Germinal--a prolonged stay in the punishment cell and a severe reprimand

• he took his later alias Koba from the hero of Georgian novelist Alexander Kazbegi’s The
Patricide which starred a classic Caucasian bandit-hero. Koba had also been the name
of his surrogate father, Koba Egnatashvili

• “Koba became Soso’s God...He wished to become Koba. He called himself ‘Koba’ and
insisted we call him that.”--classmate Iremashvili

• next came Marx, to the thunderous disapproval of Black Spot


Stalin was in constant trouble: in the school journal, the priests
recorded that he was rude, “failed to bow” to a teacher and was
“confined to the cell for five hours.” He declined to cut his hair,
growing it rebelliously long. Challenged by Black Spot, he refused
to cut it. He laughed and chatted in prayers, left Vespers early, was
late to the Hymn of the Virgin, and pranced out of mass. In
December, 1898, he turned twenty, much too old for boarding
school, and a year older than anyone else (because of time wasted
recovering from his accidents). Small wonder he was frustrated.

There were frenzied searches for the atheist’s Life of Christ by
Renan, which Stalin proudly owned...He was losing interest in his
studies. By the start of his fifth grade he was twentieth out of
twenty-three, scoring mainly 3s where he used to score 5s.

Montefiore, p. 69


What is to be
done?
N. Lenin


Messamy Dasi (Third Group) August, 1898

• 1893-founded as a socialist underground group in Tiﬂis. It took its name in contrast to a
liberal group of the 1880s, Meori Dasi (Georgian for The Second Group)

• its founders, Noe Jordania, Karlo Chkheidze, and Irakli Tseretelli soon became known
outside Georgia as spokesmen of the Menshevik wing of the Russian Social Democratic
Workers Party (RSDWP or SD)

• one of its promoters was Sylvester Djibladze, expelled from the seminary for assaulting
its principal in 1892, before Soso’s arrival. He recruited Stalin in 1898.

• “I became a Marxist because of my social position (my father was a worker in a shoe
factory and my mother was also a working woman), but also...because of the harsh
intolerance and Jesuitical discipline that crushed me so mercilessly at the Seminary….
The atmosphere in which I lived was saturated with hatred against Tsarist oppression”
--Stalin, much later


In those years there were turbulent strikes by the Tiflis workers, the
first in the capital of the Caucasus. Their effect on the working class
and the radical intelligentsia can hardly be imagined now. In later
years strikes were to become common; their sheer frequency was to
deprive them of their exciting quality. But the first strikes were a
revelation of unsuspected strength in Labour [sic]; they were a new
weapon in the social contest; and, as new weapons usually do, they
evoked exaggerated hopes and fears. Rulers and ruled alike saw in
them the sign of great events impending and of dramatic changes--
and, as far as Russia was concerned, they were not wrong.

Isaac Deutscher, Stalin; A Political Biography, 1949, rev. ed., 1960,
pp. 19-20


“I was expelled for Marxist propaganda,” Stalin boasted
mendaciously later….

The truth is that Father Abashidze had found a soft way of getting
rid of his tormentor. “I didn’t graduate,” Stalin told his Gendarme
interrogators in 1910, “because in 1899, absolutely unexpectedly, I
was invoiced 25 roubles to proceed with my education...I was
expelled for not paying this.” The Black Spot cunningly raised the
school fees. Stalin did not try to pay them. He just left….

Stalin did not qualify as a priest, but the boarding school educated
him classically--and inﬂuenced him enormously. Black Spot had,
perversely, turned Stalin into an atheist Marxist and taught him
exactly the repressive tactics--”surveillance, spying, invasion of
inner life, violation of feelings,” in Stalin’s own words--that he would
recreate in his Soviet police state.



Stalin’s only “real job”--meteorologist (28 Dec 1899- 21 Mar 1901)

• Soso needed a job and a home

• the Tiflis Meteorological Observatory was a cover for the
young revolutionary, and a tower room he shared

• he and another Gori friend organized “one of the first full-
scale radical strikes in Georgia” in the railway workshops

• Stalin lectured (propaganda) and agitated (urged action) the
workers

• he experienced his first of countless arrests

• 1 May 1900-the Maievka, socialism’s high holy day, the
Railroad workshops and the Adelkhanov Shoe Factory came
out

• it would be Soso’s last recorded contact with his father
The Physical Observatory on Mikhailovsky Street

konspiratsia


rules of the konspiratsia game

• 1881-after the shocking assassination of Tsar Alexander II, the two political police were created, the
Okhrana (undercover) and the Gendarmerie (uniformed). They began to develop the rules:

• in order to uncover the revolutionaries it was necessary to infiltrate them

• often the police spies would encourage the plotters to move from words to actions so that they could
be charged

• the police term for such an agent was provokator

• the revolutionaries called any police spy a predatel (traitor). The penalty was death

• in response, the revolutionaries tried to infiltrate the police, getting policemen who would tell them the
police plans, either out of sympathy for the revolutionary cause or for money

• things got really deadly when these infiltrators became double-agents, “playing both sides of the street”


the Degaev affair

• 1883-arrested in connection with Tsar Alexander
II’s assassination, Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will)
member Degaev agrees to become a police spy

• he is well paid for turning in his fellow
revolutionaries

• his master, Col. G. Sudeikin of the Petersburg
Okhrana, even orders murders to conceal his
double-agent’s identity

• then Degaev betrays and murders his master, ﬂees
to America and becomes a mathematics professor

Sergei Petrovich Degaev
• most predateli were not so fortunate 1857-1921


revolutionary bloodbath; the Azef affair
• 1890-from a poor Jewish family, he like so many
others, became radicalized

• 1892-fearing arrest, embezzled money to escape, ﬂed
to Germany, studied electrical engineering

• recruited by Ohkrana, returned to Russia, joined the
Socialist Revolutionaries, betrayed the head of their
assassination group, the Combat Organization, then
replaced him!

• masterminded Justice Minister von Plehve’s (1904)
and Grand Duke Sergei’s (1905) assassinations

• despite warnings from sympathetic police, the SRs
initially refused to believe he was a double-agent


konspiratsia and assassination; going underground

• Stalin meets a new radical partner, Stepan Shaumyan

• “tall, well built and very handsome with a pale face
and light blue eyes” the well-off highly educated son
of an Armenian businessman, a lady’s man

• expelled from Riga University for Marxism

• he and Stalin plan the successful murder of the Tiﬂis
railways director

• “...all tender feeling for family, friendship...even honor,
must be squashed by the sole passion for
revolutionary work.” Nechaev, Revolutionary Stepan Georgevich Shaumyan
Catechism (1878-1918)


Henceforth, Stalin usually carried a pistol in his belt….Going
underground meant that [he] also avoided conscription into the army
in 1901. On his last arrest in 1913, he told the police he had been
“exempted from conscription for family reasons in 1901.” The Gori
police ofﬁcer Davrichewy helped provide the paperwork enabling him
to escape military service, according to his son’s memoirs….Stalin
was not bothered by conscription again until 1916.

Monteﬁore, p. 83


Baku, the industrial heart of Transcaucasia


Oil; Russia’s “black gold”

• 1846-the ﬁrst oil well to be drilled (hand excavated wells since Marco Polo’s time)

• 1872-large scale development started when the Russian imperial authorities auctioned
the parcels of oil-rich land around Baku to private investors

• Swiss, British, French, Belgian, German, Swedish and American investors appeared,
among them the Nobel brothers and the Rothschild family

• an industrial belt, better known as Black City, was established near Baku

• 1883-the Nobels introduced railway tank cars when the line to Tiﬂis opened

• 1900-more than half of world oil production (11 million tons or 212,000!barrels of oil per
day), and 95 percent of all Russian oil was being extracted in Baku


Batumi, 1902
“I got a job with the Rothschilds!” crowed
Stalin

The Rothschild reﬁnery, Batumi (left)

Batumi
Baku


art from later glamorizing the young revolutionary (Lt) Stalin the student (Rt) Stalin at Batumi


Next day, the Rothschild reﬁnery was on ﬁre.
Stalin, age twenty-four, unleashed mayhem in the
oil port of Batumi.


• he ordered his ﬁrst killings of informers,
factory managers shot

• embarked on love affairs with married
women while the secret police hunted for
him

• provoked a militant strike which developed
into the storming of the prison and a
Cossack retaliatory massacre

• and printed his Marxist pamphlets with the
aid of a friendly Muslim highwayman,
Hashimi Smirba (right)


• into this heady stew of sabotage, labor agitation,
execution of predateli, assassination of “bosses,”
secret printing presses, 24 year-old Soso now adds
adultery

• his pretty peasant landlady, Natasha, age 22,
becomes the ﬁrst of countless such conquests

• when she is jailed with him after the prison riot/
massacre, Stalin will gallantly see that she receives
special treatment

Natalia (Natasha) Kirtava • even in prisons, he was able to exert authority with
the personality which later made him the Red Tsar of
all the Russias


Kutaisi prison; the ﬁrst of many

On his ﬁrst arrest, Stalin dominated the prison, killing inmates and defying the
authorities...the long haired Marxist arranged this photograph before his comrades were
sent to Siberian exile, placing himself, once again, center top ( number 4)


left and lower right; Kutaisi prison, Stalin’s cell and outside
upper right; Novaya Uda, his ﬁrst exile, where he caroused with his friends and
prepared his escape

“the frozen Georgian:Siberian exile” (Monteﬁore-Chapter 12)

Siberian exile was regarded as one of the most terrible abuses of
Tsarist tyranny. It was certainly boring and depressing, but once
settled in some godforsaken village, the exiles, intellectuals who were
often hereditary noblemen, were usually well treated. Such
paternalistic sojourns more resembled dull reading-holidays than the
living hell of Stalin’s murderous Gulags. The exiles even received
pocket-money from the Tsar--twelve roubles for a nobleman such as
Lenin, eleven roubles for a school graduate such as Molotov, and
eight for a peasant such as Stalin--with which to pay for clothes, food
and rent. If they received too much money from home they lost their
allowance.

Monteﬁore, p.111


December, 1903-- a “letter” from Lenin

“I ﬁrst met Lenin in 1903,” said Stalin, “not a personal meeting, more
a postal one. It wasn’t a long letter but a bold and fearless critique of
our Party” He exaggerated. This was not a personal letter--Lenin had
not yet heard of Stalin--but a pamphlet: “A Letter to a Comrade on
Organizational Tasks.” Nonetheless its effect on Stalin was real
enough. “That simple bold note reinforced my belief that in Lenin,
the Party had a mountain eagle.” [emphasis added, JBP]

Monteﬁore, p. 113


the first of many escapes

• “...not too difficult. Everyone tried to escape. The exile system was a sieve.” - Trotsky

• the escapee needed about 100 rubles to buy his escape kit: food, clothes, train tickets,
bribes

• 1906-1909--18,000 exiles out of a total of 32,000 escaped

• Stalin would later confuse things when he wrote his official biographies: 1930s bio Short
Course, 8 arrests, 7 exiles & 6 escapes; 1947 edition, 7 arrests, 6 exiles, 5 escapes

• “Amazingly, Stalin was being modest or forgetful. There were in fact at least 9 arrests, 4 short
detentions and 8 escapes.” Montefiore, p. 114

• Orthodox Epiphany, 1904--with a police agent’s false ID, Stalin made it back to Tiflis on the
Trans-Siberian Railway in ten days, just in time for the start of the Russo-Japanese War


Bolsheviks and Mensheviks

• when Stalin returned to the Tiﬂis SD underground, he found his comrades divided

• the Bolsheviki were the “hard line” who believed Party membership should be restricted
to full time dedicated revolutionaries who lived in the shadow world of konspiratsia

• the Mensheviki were those who felt that the Party should be “inclusive” and welcome all
who shared in the Marxist vision

• Stalin knew immediately that he sided with Lenin, the KP(b) (Kommunisticheskaya
Partiya (Bolshevika) as it came to be known

• in the ideological disputes of the time, Georgia’s “top dog” Bolshevik, Mikha Tskhakaya,
made Stalin write a Credo to make sure he was “thinking with the correct Party line”


1905

The demonstration on “Bloody Sunday”


Nineteen-hundred-and-ﬁve began and ended with slaughter. It was
the year of revolution in which young Stalin, for the ﬁrst time,
commanded armed men, tasted power, and embraced gangsterism.
On 6 February, he was in Baku when some Armenians shot a Tartar in
the centre of the city. Azeri Turks--or “Tartars” as they were often
called--retaliated. The news spread. The authorities, who had long
resented Armenian wealth and success, encouraged the Azeri mobs
to pour into the city….
Stalin was there….He had formed a small Bolshevik Battle Squad in
Baku. Now he gathered this mainly Muslim gang and ordered them to
divide the two communities wherever possible while simultaneously
taking the opportunity to steal any useful printing equipment--and
raise money for the Party by protection rackets.



During the 1905 Revolution, Stalin ran a Faginesque [Dickens’
villain in Oliver Twist] network of street children who smuggled
guns and ran errands as his private intelligence service.
Meanwhile, Stalin was pursued and watched by the agents or
“spooks” of the Okhrana, who pose (left) in their street
costumes. Yet he became adept at tricking and inﬁltrating the
secret police themselves.

pictures and caption from Monteﬁore


Bolshevik Temptress

• her parents, of German ancestry, were furious when their 27
year-old boarder seduced and ran off with 13 year-old Olga

• the couple “immersed themselves in revolutionary activism
while raising a family of two daughters and two sons”

• their Tiﬂis household “devoted to the cause, abustle with an
ever-changing cast of young conspirators--particularly those
who were dark, mysterious and to Olga’s nymphomanaical
taste”

• 1904-Stalin joined the procession and became a lover of his
future mother-in-law while his future wife was yet a baby

• “In the underground, the revolutionaries were, under a façade
Olga Alliluyeva
of prudishness, sexually liberal”--Monteﬁore


“Kamo”--”one of the Party’s most useful thugs”
• his real name, Simon Ter-Petrossian

• grew up in Gori with Stalin, who converted him to Marxism

• he often supported himself by becoming a gigolo

• “a bank robber of ingenious audacity, a Houdini of prison
escapes, a credulous simpleton--and a half-insane practitioner of
psychopathic violence”

• “Intensely, eerily tranquil with a weird ‘lustrous face’ and a blank
gaze, he was keen to serve his master, often begging Stalin:‘Let
me kill him for you!’...he later plunged his hand into a man’s
chest and cut out his heart”

• “Throughout his life, Stalin’s detached magnetism would attract,
and win the devotion of, amoral, unbounded psychopaths. His
boyhood henchman Kamo... [was] the ﬁrst in a long line.” 1882-1922


1905: Stalin is King of the Mountain

• the exploited manganese miners of the western Georgian town of Chiatura then
produced 60% of the world’s supply

• 1882-A British metallurgist had developed a new steel alloy using manganese and the
global appetite was enormous

• Summer, 1905-Stalin, “the ultimate tactician,” let the Menshevik speak first to 2,000
sweaty, coal-black miners gathered from the pits upon the Caucasus mountainside

• after he bored these plain men with high flown socialist intellectualizing, Stalin spoke
simply for just 15 minutes

• Stalin won the debate and Chiatura became a Bolshevik stronghold

• “Years later , he worked the same trick with famous orators like Trotsky”--Montefiore


King of the Mountain

this undated picture is from a later
period when artists contributed to
the cult of Great Stalin by
reconstructing episodes of his
biography for “Stalin Corners”


Only on the bones of the oppressors can the people’s
freedom be founded--only the blood of the oppressors can
fertilize the soil for the people’s self rule.

Stalin, Sochinenya (Works), vol i, p. 190


Stalin’s Red Squad

• he trained his partisans, stole guns, and smuggled in ammunition over the hills

• they disarmed Russian troops, ambushed hated cossacks, raided banks, and murdered
spooks and policemen, “until nearly the whole province was in our hands”

• Chiatura’s mountain was the base camp for the Red Squad

• Stalin’s henchman, Tsintsadze, a “dashing red-haired devil...recruited as gangsters a
handful of female students, most of them in love with him.”

• they were funded at least partly by big business:

• if they did not pay, their mines might be blown up, their managers murdered

• if they did pay, Stalin protected them


Stalin’s doomed first wife

• 1905-they met when Stalin used their Tiflis apartment as a
“safe house”

• she was the youngest of three daughters, a dressmaker to
the Tiflis officers’ wives

• 15 July 1906-they would marry in Baku, between murders,
mayhem, arrests, and Stalin’s trips to Party Congresses

• 18 March 1907-she was released from prison just in time to
deliver their son, Yakov (Yasha)

• 22 Nov 1907-Kato, just 22 years old, died in Stalin’s arms

Ekaterina (Kato) Svanidze


“The Mountain Eagle;” Stalin Meets Lenin
“I was happy to meet the mountain eagle of our Party, a great man, not only politically but also
physically too, because Lenin had taken shape in my imagination as a stately and imposing giant.”

• 26 Nov 1905-a Party meeting elected Stalin and two others
to represent the Caucasus at a conference in Skt-
Peterburg

• the revolution was ebbing after the October Manifesto; and
before he arrived, Trotsky, the Peterburg Soviet and leading
Bolsheviks were arrested

• 24 Dec-Lenin’s wife, Krupskaya, met the Caucasus trio and
sent them on to Tammerfors, in Finland to meet 40 other
Bolsheviks “disguised as teachers on holiday”

• “Back in Tiﬂis, Stalin told Davrichewy that it was Lenin's
blend of intellectual force and total practicality that made
him so remarkable ‘among all those chatterboxes’ “

• “Stalin considered himself superior to all the other
delegates except Lenin…’I was the only one who’d already
organized and led men in combat’ “

Lenin in 1905

May 13, 1907

Stalin Goes Abroad

A band of Russian revolutionists entering
the Brotherhood Church Hall--Southgate
Road, N, where their meetings are held

The Daily Mirror

Stockholm Conference April, 1906

• much more important than the Finnish conference because its 156 delegates
represented the union of Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, Polish Socialists and Jewish Bundists

• he meets for the ﬁrst time Felix Dzerzhinski, Polish Socialist and future Cheka head;
Grigori Radomyslsky, the Jewish milkman’s son soon known as “Zinoviev,” his fellow
triumvir after Lenin’s death, whom Stalin liquidated along with Kamenev in 1936; and
Alexei Rykov, Lenin’s successor as Premier, with whom Stalin would share power for a
while then liquidate in 1938

• he shared a room with “metalworker, mounted postman, and working-class dandy
Klimenti Voroshilov, who would become his Defense Commissar, First Marshall and
accomplice in the 1937 slaughter of the Soviet military”

• Mensheviks outnumbered Bolsheviks at the so-called Unity Congress. Stalin was the
lone KP (b) among the 16 delegates from the Caucasus


Stockholm Conference April, 1906

• on the first important vote, the land question,(1) Lenin favored nationalization; (2) the Mensheviks,
“municipalization” (zemstvo control); (3) Stalin, giving the land to individual peasant proprietors

• when the Congress debated whether to run in elections for the Imperial Duma, most Bolsheviks
were against, but Lenin supported the idea and voted with the winning Mensheviks. Stalin
abstained

• Lenin and Krasin, his urbane money-laundering and terrorism maestro, made themselves scarce
when the Congress passed a resolution to ban the bank robberies,attacks on treasury transports,
and troop movements. “We should not have taken up arms” --Plekhanov

• but Lenin had no intention of giving up his bank robbing--he needed the money. Stalin was
instructed to prepare for the big Tiflis heist. Lenin observed, for the first time, Stalin’s value as a
ruthless underground fighter as well as a forceful independent politician

• “in Stockholm, the comrades made Soso buy a suit, a felt hat, and a pipe so he looked like a real
European. It was the first time we saw him well dressed.”-- Sashiko Svanidze (his soon-to-be
sister-in-law)


preparing for “the Big Job”

• Stalin commissioned his most ruthless henchman, Kamo, to come up with the weapons,
pistols and “apples,” (hand grenades) with money pirated from a steamship carrying
government funds from Odessa to Batumi

• Stalin himself found the “inside man,” one Voznesensky, who had studied with him at the
Gori Spiritual School and the Tiflis Seminary. He now worked in the Tiflis banking mail office
with access to the invaluable, secret schedules of the cash stagecoaches. He agreed to help
because he admired Soselo’s poetry. Only in Georgia!

• in Skt-Peterburg, Kamo charmed Lenin and Krupskaya with his combination of simplicity,
lethality and craziness. Krasin sent them to Brussels with introductions to arms
manufacturers sympathetic to the Cause

• the twenty brigands who made up the core of “the Outfit” were briefed on Soso’s elaborate
plan, a terrorist extravaganza that would make headlines worldwide

• they only needed to wait for the right time--”Expropriate the expropriators!”--Marx


Stalin in London 27 April/10 May 1907-”about three weeks later”

“The delegates were met by an incongruous crew of English reporters
and photographers, twelve Special Branch detectives and two
Okhrana agents, as well as by local sympathizers who were either
English socialists or Russian exiles.

“History is being made in London!” declared the Daily Mirror, which
seemed to be most fascinated by the fact that some of the
revolutionaries were “women burning with zeal for the great cause”--
and by their lack of luggage in that age of stately travel. “There is not a
man over forty and many little over twenty”--Stalin was 29 and Lenin
was 37 (but “we always called him the Old Man” Stalin said later). “It
was,” concluded the Daily Mirror, “a most picturesque crowd.”



The entrance to the hall
showing three delegates
going in to a meeting
and a watchman at the
door


The London (5th) SD Congress

• 30 April/13 May--Plekhanov opened the Congress with a hymn for fallen comrades

• Stalin watched how Lenin sat with”the tall, haunted and spectre-thin Gorky,
international celebrity and Bolshevik fund-raiser...Later in life, Gorky would become
[Stalin’s] friend, shameful apologist, pathetic trophy and possibly victim.”

• 302 voting delegates, but the Party was in dire straits, shattered by the Tsar’s repression

• 92 Bolsheviks, 85 Mensheviks, 54 Jewish Bundists, 45 Polish-Lithuanians, and 26 Letts

• Trotsky, recently escaped from Siberia, was the star speaker. Stalin hated him on sight.

• Menshevik leader Martov, real name Tsederbaum, like Trotsky, Jewish, challenged Stalin’s
credentials unsuccessfully. Another lifelong hatred began. “His resentment of Jewish
intellectuals exposed Stalin’s burning inferiority complex.”--Monteﬁore


The London (5th) SD Congress

• the conference…”marked the emergence of Stalin the Russian. Weary of Georgia’s
petty squabbles and Menshevik dominance, he was ready to concentrate on Baku and
Russia herself. Henceforth he wrote in Russian, not Georgian”

• the Mensheviks did achieve their goal of making bank robberies grounds for expulsion
from the Party. Stalin kept his silence

• Lenin worried about the poorer delegates like Stalin who lived in ﬂop houses in the East
End, while Lenin and the other big shots lived in comfortable hotels

• he arranged for Gorky’s mistress to distribute beer and sandwiches

• one night Stalin was almost beaten up by some drunken dockside workers

• the Party ran short of funds and had to make an odd bargain with capitalism


Russian Social Democratic Labour Party

When they ran out of money, Lenin
had to borrow from Joseph Fels, an
American soap millionaire who
insisted every delegate sign the
agreement (right)

Everyone signed using aliases:
“Vasily from Baku” is probably
Stalin


The Bank Robbery
At 10:30 a.m. on the sultry morning of Wednesday, 26 June 1907, in
the seething central square of Tiflis, a dashing moustashioed cavalry
captain [Kamo] in boots and jodhpurs, wielding a big Circassian
sabre, performed tricks on horseback, joking with two pretty, well
dressed Georgian girls who twirled gaudy parasols--while fingering
Mauser pistols hidden in their dresses.

Raffish young men in bright peasant blouses and wide sailor-style
trousers waited on the street corners, cradling secreted revolvers
and grenades….All of them were waiting to carry out the first exploit
by...Stalin, aged twenty-nine, to win the attention of the world.

Montefiore, p. 3


• as the two stagecoaches, full of cash and policemen, guarded
by cossack outriders, galloped into the square, a rain of bombs
descended from rooftops

• horses, cossacks, police and bystanders were literally blown to
pieces

• the money was transferred to a phaeton driven up by the
leader, Kamo and carried off to a safe house

• as he left the square, he passed the chief of police. “The money
is safe, go to the bank!” The policeman fell for it and missed the
chance to arrest the gang members still on the square. The
next day he committed suicide.

• mastermind Stalin was probably at the train station, ready to
bug out if things went wrong


Kamo’s mugshot
he was arrested in Berlin!

• the robbery was “a poisoned chalice...Lenin and his comrades fought for possession of the cash
like rats in a cage. His enemies spent the next three years [in] Party investigations hoping to ruin
him”

• Stalin was expelled from the Party by the Tiflis Committee. He spent the rest of his life trying to
cover up his role in the “expropriations,” (“exes,” for short) “His career as gangster godfather,
audacious bank robber, killer, pirate and arsonist, though whispered at home and much enjoyed by
critics abroad, remained hidden until the twenty- first century.”

• “In another sense, the Tiflis spectacular was the making of him...the one patron who really
counted, Lenin, decided that Stalin was “exactly the kind of person I need”


gangsters and groupies
1907-1913


...of the ten years between 1907 and 1917, [Stalin] spent nearly
seven in prisons, on the way to Siberia, in Siberian banishment,
and in escapes from the places of his banishment. His carefully
collected political writings of that period add up to less than one
slender volume of his Works. The most indulgent reader of that of
that volume could hardly ﬁnd in it any proof of striking political or
intellectual attainment. The man who in the beginning of 1917
hurried back from Siberia to Petersburg to lead the Bolsheviks
before Lenin’s return from Switzerland had made little advance on
the youthful author of the essays published in Brdzola [the
Georgian underground press]. The clue to his promotion lay in his
practical activities rather than in any talent for letters or
journalism.

Deutscher, p. 97


Stalin thrived in the underworld,
on the run, in and out of prison,
hunting spies in his own Party
and repeatedly escaping from
Siberian exile. Here in police mug
shots (top, left) Stalin in Baku,
1908, and (bottom left, and right)
headed “Baku Gubernia
Gendarmerie,” in 1910--his
shorter left arm is visible. Times
were harder. He is noticeably
thinner.


November, 1907--Kato, Stalin’s wife died a terrible death:He was heartbroken
(far right). The family blamed him. He said his tenderness died with her. He
threw himself into the grave, then narrowly escaped arrest at her funeral.


After Kato’s death, Stalin enjoyed a
string of love affairs with, amongst
others, Alvasi Talakvadze (above left)
and Ludmilla Stal (above right), the
experienced Russian Bolshevik who
may have inspired his famous name


()$*#&*& (Praktiki,practical men)
θεωρια (theory) versus !ραξιζ (practice)

Two years of revolutionary work among the oil workers of Baku
hardened me as a practical fighter and as one of the practical
leaders. In contact with advanced workers of Baku...in the storm
of the deepest conflicts between workers and oil industrialists...I
first learned what it meant to lead big masses of workers. There in
Baku I thus received my second baptism in revolutionary combat.

Stalin, Sochinenia, viii, p. 174
in Deutscher, p. 98


Baku, the lawless oil boom city where Stalin embraced
gangsterism, extortion and piracy to fund Lenin

hellish oilﬁelds

An oil fountain


Baku’s millionaires
the palace of Nagayev, a
self-made tycoon possibly
kidnapped by Stalin

The Baku oil baron
Mukhtarov (with his wife)
w h o o rd e re d S t a l i n
beaten up or killed


“Sergo” ( ) Григо́рий Константи́нович Орджоники́дзе

• born in western Georgia to a noble family

• 1903-entered Soso’s “Outﬁt” after graduating as a doctor
from Tiﬂis Medical College

• arrested for arms smuggling, exiled to Germany

• 1907-returned to Georgia, settled in Baku, worked closely
with Stalin, believed to have assassinated Prince
Chavchavadze, poet and Stalin’s patron in 1896, on Stalin’s
orders

• 1909-Stalin sent him to Teheran in charge of a group of
Bolsheviks, with arms to foment the Persian Constitutional
Revolution. They tried to assassinate the Shah

Grigori Constantinovich Ordzhonikidze • 1912-escaped and returned from Siberian exile with Stalin
1886-1937


Koba and Sergo organize the Baku workers, 1907

• in the oilﬁelds, Europe and Asia met. The workers were Russian and Armenian Christians
(48%), Persian, Lezgin, and Tartar Muslims (42%) and Turks (10%). Russian was the
lingua franca of these peoples. Stalin stopped writing in Georgian.

• Stalin lived in the Muslim quarter and worked mainly with the less-skilled oilﬁeld
roustabouts. He argued for CIO-type industrial organization. The Mensheviks focused on
the skilled Christian laborers in the workshops and urged AF of L-type craft unions

• Stalin prevailed with the oil barons, and the 50,000 Baku workers elected their delegates

• “While all over Russia black reaction was reigning, a genuine workers’ parliament was in
session in Baku”--Sergo Ordzhonikidze

• after eight or nine months of organizing and strikes, Koba and Sergo were arrested and
imprisoned locally, awaiting conviction (25 Mar 1908-Jan 1909) and exile


European exile
Vologda Province, Solvychegodsk (Feb 1909-June 1909 and Oct, 1910-July 1911)

• a small village in Northern Russia, dull but with loose discipline and plenty of
opportunities for politicking, boozing and womanizing

• after getting money, he made his escape, dressed as a woman and entrained for Skt-
Peterburg where the Alliluyevs brieﬂy sheltered him

• July 1909-he returned to Baku as an Armenian merchant, but the Okhrana wasn’t fooled

• “The Social-Democrat escapee from Siberia has arrived--he is known as ‘Koba’ or ‘Soso’”

• he will be intermittently watched, but the secret police will not arrest him for several
months to ﬁnish serving out his exile

• was Stalin an agent for the Okhrana?


There now started a farrago of bewildering scandals that revealed that Stalin’s
party was riddled with Tsarist spies. Stalin reacted by unleashing a hysterical,
murderous witch hunt for traitors which only succeeded in destroying the
innocent--and drawing suspicion onto himself….It was a mess. Soso liked to fix
such messes with quiet killings, but that did not work this time….If one throws
into this poisonous cauldron the accusations of betrayal against him as early as
1902, his secret police contacts and his escapes from exile and prison, it might
look plausible that he was a Tsarist agent.

Yet the case against Stalin is actually a weak one….His secret-police contacts are
not as suspicious as they seem….It was his job to groom Gendarme or Okhrana
officers, to generate tip-offs about traitors and police raids, and to engineer quick
releases for arrested comrades. Some contacts...were sympathizers, most just
wanted money.

The money flowed both ways. Virtually all Okhrana agents were paid, but Stalin
received no such mysterious income. As for Stalin’s many escapes from
exile…,”Those who didn’t escape,”explained one secret policeman,”did not want
to, for personal reasons.”



European exile
Vologda Province, Solvychegodsk (Feb 1909-June 1909 and Oct, 1910-July 1911)

• July, 1909-March, 1910--Koba worked to re inspire the Baku Bolsheviks who had lost
numbers and funds during his absence.

• just as he was preparing a general strike in the oilfields, Okhrana arrested him. He
waited in jail six months for his sentence. His comrades procured the phlegm of man
with TB and bribed the prison doctor to get him transferred to the hospital.

• the sentence, finish out his term in Solvychegodsk, thereafter banishment from the
Caucasus and all major Russian cities for five years.

• Oct 1910-he returned to the northern village. Once again boredom led to fornication. In
Montefiore’s words; “Two Lost Fiancées and a Pregnant Peasant”

• 24 Jan 1911-”I’m suffocating here without active work, literally suffocating” Koba wrote

• when escape funds arrived they were almost instantly stolen from him. He gave up and
served out his term

The Central Committee &
“Glamourpuss” the Schoolgirl
• upon release he was ordered to remain two months in the provincial capital, Vologda

• the exile Central Committee ("# OR CC) in Paris appointed a Russian Organizational
Committee with Sergo as a member and Stalin as a special traveling envoy

• Stalin had a brief ﬂing with the sixteen year-old mistress of one of his comrades. The
Okhrana code name for her was “Glamourpuss” (Nariadnaya) “a frivolous and rebellious
schoolgirl...Koba was happy to waste a month in her company”

• they never met again, but he kept writing. When he was exiled in 1913 she lost contact
with him forever.

• 6 Sept 1911-Stalin shook off his “tails” and took the train to Skt-Peterburg where he
stayed with his friends the Alliluyevs. He was arrested there on 9 September, sent back
to Vologda. There Sergo told him the news, he was appointed to the CC!


Russian Social-DemocraticWorkers Party

TRUTH
ORGAN
OF THE CENTRAL COMMITTEE

OF THE PETERBURG COMM.
R.S.D.R.P

No. 10. Thursday DAILY PAPER 16 March 1912

• Stalin had urged the creation of a new, invigorated national paper while still in Baku,
before his elevation to the "#(CC)

• Feb 1912-now, secretly in Peterburg, disguised in the uniform of an Army Medical
Officer, his job was to convert the Party weekly Zvezda (Star) into a daily, Pravda (Truth)

• April 1912- “...we agreed on the Pravda platform and worked out the first issue.”
Founded in three little rooms, [it] was legal--but its illegal editor-in-chief, Stalin, had to
run it from the shadows

• the massacre of hundreds of miners in the Siberian Lena River gold fields sold out
several reprints


Cracow, Vienna and the Nationalities Question

• Oct 1912-after organizing the campaign which elected 6 Bolsheviks to the Fourth Duma, Stalin
received orders from “the Old Man” to join him and Krupskaya in Galicia for a "# meeting

• “Illich liked Cracow [with its 4,000 Russian exiles] very much. It was almost Russia.”-Krupskaya

• Dec 1912-there Lenin drew his Georgian Praktik (Practical Man) out on the Nationalities Question. he
wanted both to learn and to evaluate this 34 year-old. He must have approved of Koba’s ideas.

• he directed him to prepare a theoretical piece for the Party’s “solid sociological journal,”
Prosveschenia (Enlightenment). Next, he sent him to Vienna, heart of Austria-Hungary’s multi-
national empire

• Jan 1913-there, at the same time as failed artist, 23 year-old Hitler, Koba wrote and had “his ﬁrst and
last experience of civilized European living” These six weeks were his longest stay outside Russia

• The Problems of Nationalities and Social Democracy written (in Russian) by K. Stalin


23 February 1913--Betrayal at the Fundraiser Ball


Siberian “hard time”
1913-1917

Kureika on the Arctic Circle


Yellow = uninhabited or sparsely populated

Stalin’s
last exile


the Turukhansk exiles, 1915


Spandarian Kamenev
Sverdlov

Vera
Shveitzer

the Turukhansk exiles, 1915


Lidia Pereprygina
paedophilia
(picture of her, middle aged,
after WW II)


his other diversion


12 Mar 1917 12 Dec 1916

9 Feb 1917
7 Mar 1917

Stalin’s return
with Lev Kamenev
and Vera Shveitzer


Stalin;origins

Recommended

Recommended

More Related Content

Similar to Stalin;origins

Similar to Stalin;origins (17)

More from Jim Powers

More from Jim Powers (20)

Recently uploaded

Recently uploaded (20)

Stalin;origins